If a headline sounds too good to be true, think twice.

A widely circulated research study claiming to show that Internet Explorer users have lower IQs has been outed as a hoax.

An outlet calling itself the “AptiQuant Psychometric Consulting Company” threw up a phony website a month ago, copied staff photos from a French site, and issued a press release [malware-free PDF] to reporters. Major newspapers, web sites and television stations from England to the US ran the story.

If they looked at the purported data at all, they didn’t look at it very closely. This may have been a clever hoax, but it wasn’t a careful one.

Journalists get press releases from small research companies all the time. I’d guessed that someone was spinning a small statistical variation into a bigger story than it probably warranted. No big deal. It happens all the time.

But that’s not what the study claimed to show. If anything, most outlets toned it down. Only some, like The Daily Mail, relayed the full implications:

As Cambridge statistician David Spiegelhalter told the BBC, “these figures are implausibly low – and an insult to IE users.” To their credit, someone at The Daily Mail realized this was batty, and they quickly pulled the story from their site.

A few other red flags that should have suggested AptiQuant’s claims were, at minimum, untrue:

• AptiQuant had no footprint, no history of past studies of either intelligence or technology, despite claiming to have been a “world leader in the field of online psychometric testing” since 2006;
• The assessment tool was a free online IQ test delivered through search engine ads. This might be a valid methodology for generating spammy pop-ups, but not scientific study. (Snarky aside: we’re supposed to believe that Opera users clicking these ads have an average “superior intelligence” IQ of 125?)
• AptiQuant’s mailing address (if deliverable) would be in the middle of an intersection in downtown Vancouver.
• This paragraph:

The study showed a substantial relationship between an individual’s cognitive ability and their choice of web browser. From the test results, it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers. This hypothesis can be extended to any software in general, however more research is needed for that, which is a potential future work as an extension to this report.

At a certain point, AptiQuant’s release itself became irrelevant; the conclusion was repeated because other, more trusted news outlets had reported on them.

Soundbites like these spread and grow like kudzu on social media because they give our feelings a name, offering ammunition in an argument and justifying something many of us believe a version of already.

Too often, business analysts and statistics and insider rumors carry a similar currency in journalism. They often add just a thin sheen of detail and a slightly stronger claim to verification. Really, guys; it’s just a color PDF.